Emoticons have acquired immense popularity and hence importance in new email, chatroom, instant messaging, and even operating system applications. The variety of available emoticons has increased tremendously, from a few types of “happy faces” to a multitude of elaborate and colorful animations. In many cases, an increase in the number of available emoticons has been a selling feature for new releases of communications products. However, there are now so many emoticons available that some applications may be reaching a limit on the number of pre-established (“pre-packaged”) emoticons that can be included with or managed by an application. There is an exhaustion point for trying to provide a pre-packaged emoticon for every human emotion. Still, users clamor for more emoticons, and especially for more nuanced emoticons that capture the subtleties of human emotions and situations.
FIG. 1 shows a conventional list of pre-packaged emoticons 100 in a dialogue box of an application. Typically a user selects one of the emoticons to insert within a textual dialogue or email by double clicking a mouse on an icon 102 of the emoticon, or by clicking on the icon 102 and then actuating a select button 104.
With the increase in the number and “sophistication” of emoticons, some problems are inevitable. Many chatroom and instant messaging products, in which emoticons find perfect application in describing the users' real-time emotions, rely on limited bandwidth or the transmission of short communications (“messages”) that contain relatively little data. In other words, many chatroom and instant messaging applications achieve their agility and speed by streamlining data bulk into “lean” messages that typically have a limited data size, such as 1-2 kilobytes or approximately 400 alphanumeric characters plus headers. Adding one or more complex emoticons—a graphic that may require an inordinate amount of data space compared with text—to one of these lean messages can be detrimental to the performance of the chatroom or instant messaging application. Still, an emoticon picture is often worth a thousand words of text, so techniques are needed for producing an even greater variety of emoticons and for being able to send them without increasing the data size of lean messages.